Mexico’s Vigilantes on the March

Enrique Krauze
is a historian, the editor of the literary magazine Letras Libres and
the author of Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America. This
article was translated by Hank Heifetz from the Spanish.

MEXICO
CITY — In the past, Mexico’s revolutions and internal wars have all
been eruptions stemming from deep social problems. They unleashed
enormous destructive power and took decades to run their course. But
they were always followed by long periods of peace and economic
development.

The
country’s present social unrest has a different source and is of a
different nature. If the sweeping economic reforms of 2013 attract
investment and are implemented efficiently and honestly (two bigs ifs),
the major remaining obstacles to real social progress will be the
powerful force of organized crime and the weakness of legal and
practical measures to stem it.

Since
democracy came to Mexico in 2000, the country has sunk into a cycle of
violence fed by intense criminality. Images circulating on social media
starkly depict its horrific cruelty. It is true that narco cartels and
other organized crime groups (with allies in high political positions)
have grown vastly stronger since the 1970s. But no one foresaw the
paradoxical cause of their huge expansion: the limits set by democracy
on the formerly near-dictatorial power of the president.

The
arrival of democracy has had a centrifugal effect in sharply
strengthening local power. In places where local politicians and the
police are corrupt, criminals have become autonomous and fearless. A
kind of civil war with multiple fronts has developed — an intensifying
conflict between the state and the cartels, as well as among the
cartels....